How We'll Fund 21st Century Social Movements

It is time to solve a fundamental problem that plagues progressives everywhere – the lack of seed money to get innovative projects off the ground and the absence of workable funding models to sustain ongoing efforts to create systemic cultural, economic, and political change.

In our latest collaborative project (also funded by the crowd), the Progressive Strategy Handbook, we suggest that it is time for us to embrace `… our role as social innovators and change agents who create the new and better world.` We assert that it is time to `… unleash our entrepreneurial creativity and cultivate our institutions of tomorrow.`

In short what we must do is identify the infrastructure and models that show us how to bypass the constraints of the existing political process as well as the entrenched corporate power structures that stand in the way of progress. We believe that it is now possible for the grassroots to mobilize and align forces in a way that wasn’t possible before, using the new tools of social media and digital communication. If we are to take advantage of these tools (as protesters have done in Egypt and Tunisa), we must figure out:

What are the most promising funding models and how do we start to use them?

Why aren’t more effective models available for funding social innovation?

What crowdsourcing and mass collaboration infrastructure is available to coordinate the activity of literally thousands of social innovators and activists that are working on similar problems?

What success stories can we point to?

What do we need to do in order to start building the infrastructure and funding models to mobilize thousands of social innovators and activists?

If we are able to reach our fundraising goal, we will deliver a handbook that provides:

An overview fo how crowdsourcing leads to breakthroughs in funding social movements;

A framework of open collaboration to engage change agents in the funding and building of movements;

Concrete first steps for financing and developing infrastructure to support these new models and high-impact projects.

If we reach our goal of $5000 we will pull together a team of experts on innovative financing models, collaboration platforms, and social movements to draft a crowdfunding handbook. Everyone who pledges money to the project will be invited to provide comments and feedback to improve the handbook before it is published.

Upon completion, the handbook will be made freely available to everyone under a Creative Commons license. If the crowd pays for it, the crowd will own it.